Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro
The catalogue for Jenny Saville's first major exhibition in Venice, held at Ca' Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna in 2026 during the 61st Biennale, where her paintings hung in dialogue with the city's old masters.
The show gathered more than thirty canvases and works on paper from the 1990s to the present, and its final room held new works made in response to Venice. The bilingual English and Italian catalogue reproduces the exhibited works with full-bleed details of several paintings and installation photographs. The curator, Elisabetta Barisoni, contributes an essay on Saville's use of art-historical sources. Stefania Ventra of Ca' Foscari University talks with the artist about her early trips to Venice, the influence of Titian and her pursuit of emotional truth. Graphic Thought Facility designed the book, a square hardcover issued in a slipcase.
Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. She came to notice with the Young British Artists in the early 1990s, painting the body at monumental scale in heavy layers of oil and drawing on Titian, Tintoretto, de Kooning and Picasso as much as on surgery and medical pathology. The National Portrait Gallery in London gave her a major exhibition in 2025. She is represented by Gagosian.
